Art Market

The difficulties at the top end of the Modern and Contemporary art market were very much in evidence at the latest flagship auction series in New York.

Two pictures with natural history subjects drew the strongest competition among the Indian works of art consigned from the collection of the late Francis Golding (1944-2013) to a recent Roseberys’ (26% buyer’s premium) sale.

Despite ongoing concerns that the current economic uncertainty, anaemic growth and trade tariffs is affecting the supply of major lots, the value to auction houses of paintings by ‘big names’ was underlined at Lyon &Turnbull’s latest Modern Made auction.

The earliest known painted work by the Indian sculptor Ganpatrao Mhatre (1879-1947) drew international interest at a recent sale at Chiswick Auctions (26% buyer’s premium).

At the time that the London-born artist George Chapman (1908-1993) first encountered the Rhondda Valley in 1953, he happened to be reading a series of books by US writer William Faulkner.

A market-fresh Orientalist scene by John Frederick Lewis (1804-76), unseen in public for a generation, led the latest sale of 19th Century and British Impressionist Art at Bonhams.

A previously lost and unpublished work by Johann Friedrich Overbeck (1789-1869) sold for €104,000 (£87,000) as part of the Tajan (26% buyer’s premium) latest Old Master Paintings and Drawings sale.

A painting by Terence Cuneo depicting the German surrender at Lüneburg Heath has sold for £60,000 at Sworders.

Among the works on paper attracting interest at the early spring auctions was a 19th century study that emerged at a sale in Dumfries.